The recent advances in gear manufacture have led to the ability to produce gears in flexible machines that can be automatically loaded and unloaded by robotic handling means. The developments in gear inspection equipment have not kept pace, however, and a tremendous need exists today for highly accurate, fast inspection equipment that can verify and, if possible, feed back correction data to such machines.
Such equipment could be located after the gear manufacturing machines, taking gears from a line and perhaps serving more than one machine. The equipment could also be located in the machine serving to directly feed back data before the gear was off loaded. This latter case has the advantage that it can utilize the gear while it is still fixtured on the machine's arbor or centers and the cost and potential loss of accuracy and speed of refixturing in a separate inspection machine is not undergone. The disadvantage however is that one has to have inspection equipment for each machine and further that the inspection equipment has to be able to operate in the atmosphere of the machine, which can be difficult.
The answer to these needs, laser triangulation based equipment, is shown which answers both of the problems, post process and in-process plus recieving and audit inspection and measurement of gears.